David Haig, interview: After Ben Elton? King Lear, of course

David Haig is best known for comedy, but now he is tackling the mightiest
tragic role of all – King Lear. He talks to Jasper Rees.

Challenge: David Haig, about to tackle King Lear at the Theatre Royal, BathPhoto: David Rose

By Jasper Rees

7:10AM BST 24 Jul 2013

There was a peculiarity in the Queen’s latest Birthday Honours: namely, that you apparently qualified for a gong if you’ve ever done a Ben Elton sitcom. Arise Sir Baldrick (aka Tony Robinson), unwashed sidekick to newly anointed CBE Edmund Blackadder. Rowan Atkinson, it will be recalled, also starred in Elton’s The Thin Blue Line alongside David Haig, who has been made an MBE.

Haig, no less talented a comedian though not such a marquee name, has just returned to yet another Elton sitcom in ITV’s The Wright Way. It has not met with critical high-fives.

“The last time a project I was involved with had reviews that bad,” says Haig, “was The Thin Blue Line. The press simply cannot bear that Ben in their eyes became a populist. I absolutely love his writing. I always have done and I always will.” Apparently Her Majesty feels the same way.

Let’s turn to another popular English writer who – fingers tightly crossed – should soon supply Haig with better notices. It may wrongfoot those who admire Haig for his services to comedy, but at the age of 57 the moment has come to unveil his Lear. No matter that he last did a Shakespeare “a million years ago” – Angelo for Trevor Nunn in Measure for Measure.

It’s happening at Theatre Royal Bath, where a couple of years ago Haig served notice of his talent for portraying royal derangement in Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III, which duly careered up to the West End. So when the tragic summons came, did the gifted farceur think twice?

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“I never baulked because I think if you’re offered something like that, have a go. And it’s too late for me not to take risks, weirdly. What’s the worst that could happen?”

The worst that could happen is that audiences don’t quite buy into the idea of Haig’s tyrannical paterfamilias raging ferociously against the dying of the light. Haig thinks there’s a lot in himself to work with, and not just because of his five children, three of whom are daughters, two in their twenties, one a mere 13.

“It’s to do with a family man apparently in control, and the potential for madness, the potential for that controlling side of him to disintegrate when challenged. And that’s something I understand.”

Haig’s portrayals of implosion have largely been in the cause of hilarity up till now. He has the face for comedy – an Edwardian moustache, and eyes that smile soothingly – plus a voice that oozes outward calm. With these tools he has carved a niche for himself playing well-spoken authority figures who gradually lose control of their surroundings: most popularly in The Thin Blue Line, but also in the theatre – in Alan Ayckbourn’s House and Garden, in Michael Frayn’s Donkey’s Years, as Pinchwife in The Country Wife, and PM Jim Hacker in the rebooted Yes Prime Minister (which also did a stint on television). You could even include the domestically challenged Mr Banks in Mary Poppins.

Ready to implode: David Haig with Zabou Breitman (left) and Jane Asher in House and Garden at the National Theatre in 2000 (Picture: Alastair Muir)

If Haig is so adept at pretending to lose his grip, it’s because of an innate fear that he will do so for real. That’s his theory, anyway. It’s no coincidence, he says, that he learns his lines long before he enters the rehearsal room. It quietens “the devil on your shoulder telling you you do not know what you’re doing to say next”.

Such is his desire to keep a hold of his own destiny that in the late Nineties he took up his pen and became a playwright in order “to try and stay as varied as possible so that I was never closed down”. My Boy Jack, the resulting play, also gave him a different sort of role. He played Kipling, stoically sending his only surviving son off to a good imperial death in the trenches. (He also starred in the TV version 10 years on, with Daniel Radcliffe in the title role.)

His performance as Kipling highlighted a less often spotted talent for not going over the top – see also his TS Eliot in Tom and Viv or, most movingly of all, his self-sacrificial schoolmaster in the revival of RC Sheriff’s Journey’s End.

Another play soon followed about a Samaritan who turns out not to be so good, and a third play – about the meteorologist who in the face of intense opposition recommended that Eisenhower delay the D-Day landings – is coming next year to Chichester. It’s called Pressure.

My Boy Jack was at least partly inspired by his own father, who left the army after 20 years to run the Hayward Gallery. “He was a great apologist for British imperialist aspirations and this extraordinarily sensitive, humane man who was into the arts.”

For many years his oldest son was a baffling disappointment. Haig was expelled from Rugby, spent a year on a kibbutz and two years with a girlfriend in Denmark.

“I was pathologically lazy and my parents despaired. I didn’t really do anything. I just used to chill out, like girls, get stoned. And then I found this thing that I was prepared to work at and didn’t perceive to be work.”

And how he works. It’s not just because bringing up five children has often had him wondering “where the next copper’s going to come from”. He also works with Stakhanovite energy, he says, because “distraction is the root to contentment. If I’m not absorbed I find it difficult not to see the world from a pretty bleak perspective. But if I am tired after a day’s work I am entirely at peace.”

He attributes the pessimistic worldview – apparently so at odds with the instinct for comedy – to personal tragedy. Haig lost a sister when he was 22 and he and his wife suffered a still birth (he is patron of the charity Sands, which deals with stillbirth and neonatal death).

“I don’t get gooey or sentimental about it. It’s just part of the human condition that interests me. It’s contributed to every attitude that I have. Nothing ever surprises me now. Why should anything that happens surprise anybody? It’s just a lottery and an earlier dose of oblivion for whoever goes. I think about the human condition a lot. Ultimately it’s difficult – particularly now – to be optimistic. You just look around the world. I really don’t know humanity is going to survive.”

The eyes crinkle and a laugh escapes from under the moustache from a bygone age. “That’s a bit dark,” he concedes. All the better to do Lear the right way, and not The Wright Way.

King Lear begins previews at the Theatre Royal, Bath, on July 25. Tickets: 01225 448844; theatreroyal.org.uk